Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
Do Not Abhor Us, for Your Name's Sake
Jeremiah 14:17-22
17 “You shall say this word to them: “‘Let my eyes run down with tears night and day, and let them not cease; for the virgin daughter of my people is broken with a great breach, with a very grievous wound. · WEB
The second prayer of the chapter drops every appeal to the people's own case and rests entirely on what God has committed himself to.
The section opens with tears assigned as a message. Jeremiah is told to say to them that his eyes run down night and day and do not cease. The grief is not a private reaction but part of the communication, which is why it is dictated. And the wound is described in medical terms, a great breach and a very grievous injury, in a book that has already asked whether there is a physician available Jeremiah 8:22.
The survey that follows is brief and closes every exit. Go out into the field and there are men killed by the sword; come into the city and there are men dying of famine. Siege warfare produced exactly that arrangement, where the two options were the enemy outside and starvation inside. And the clause that ends the verse is the worst of it: prophet and priest go about in the land and have no knowledge. The men whose function was to know are wandering with the rest.
The prayer that comes out of this is different from the one earlier in the chapter, and the difference is instructive. It begins with three questions that are close to accusations. Have you utterly rejected Judah? Has your soul loathed Zion? Why have you struck us with no healing? It repeats the confession, adding the fathers' iniquity to their own. And then it abandons argument from the people's side altogether. It rests on four things that belong to God: his name, the throne of his glory, his covenant, and the fact that no vanity of the nations can make it rain. Aren't you he, Yahweh our God? Therefore we will wait for you.
That is the strongest form of appeal available to anyone with no case, and the chapter deliberately leaves it unanswered. The reply arrives in the first verse of the next section and it is a refusal so severe that it names the two greatest intercessors in the nation's history Jeremiah 15:1. What the arrangement establishes is that the prayer's theology was not the problem. Everything in it is true, and the truth of it is not enough at this point. The people praying it have been described for fourteen chapters as unwilling to stop doing the one thing the prayer asks to be forgiven.
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